Out of the mist rose Mr. Crashaw. This was a little old man with a crabbed face and a body that seemed to have endured infernal twistings in some Inquisitioner's torture-chamber. Maggie learnt afterwards that he had suffered for many years from intolerable rheumatism, but to-night the contortions and windings of the body with which he climbed up onto the platform, and then the grimaces that he made as his large round head peered over the top of the desk, might have struck any less solemn assemblage as farcical. He wore an old shiny black frock coat and a white rather grimy tie fastened in a sharp little bow. His face was lined like a map, his cheeks seamed and furrowed, his forehead a wilderness of marks, his scanty hair brushed straight back so that the top of his forehead seemed unnaturally shiny and bald; his hands, with which he clutched the side of his desk, were brown and wrinkled and grasping like a monkey's. His eyes were the eyes of a fanatic, but they were not steady and speculative like Warlock's or glowing and distant like Aunt Anne's, but rather angry and restless and pugnacious; they were the eyes of a madman, but of a madman who can yet calculate upon and arrange his position in the world. He was mad for his own purposes, and could, for these same purposes, bind his madness to its proper bounds. He seemed to Maggie at first rather pathetic with his little twisted body and his large round head. Very soon it was emotions quite other than pity that she was feeling. She saw at once that he was a practised preacher, and she who had, with the exception of Mr. Warlock, never heard a fine preacher, was at once under the sway of one of the ablest and most dramatic orators of his time. His voice was sweet and clear, and seemed strange enough coming from that ugly and malevolent countenance. Only the head and the grasping hands could be seen, but sometimes the invisible body was driven with such force against the desk that it seemed that it must fling the thing over, down into the congregation. "My brothers and sisters," he began, "I have come to-night to give you a warning, and this warning is given to you not as the expression of a personal opinion but as the declaration of an assumed fact. Disregard it or not as you please, but I shall have done my duty in pointing out to you the sure and certain meaning of my message." "I, a sinner like the rest of you, live nevertheless in the fear of hell fire. Hell fire has become, I think, to many of the present generation a mockery and a derision. I come to tell you that it is no mockery, that it as surely lies there, a blazing furnace, in front of us as though we saw it with our own eyes ..."